Satan’s Lambs Read Online Free PDF

cut her Econ class to be there so she’d be able to answer Whitney’s endless round of questions afterward—the tedious postmortem that made theater majors such a pain in the ass.
    Did you notice I flubbed that second line? Could you tell my knees were shaking? I was sweating like a pig — could you see that?
    It was the first time Lena had met Whitney’s pal, the effervescent Rick Savese—a tap-dancing, piano-playing aspiring actor. He’d played piano for Whitney—his hair slicked back, a Camel cigarette dangling from his lips. He swore afterward it was his back-up that had made the difference, and gotten Whitney the part.
    Whitney had introduced him to her little sister Lena, the up-and-coming economics major. He’d immediately asked Lena to lunch, and then dinner.
    Jeffrey Hayes had been there too, hanging out with one of the backstage girls, the one who spent an inordinate amount of time at the student center playing Dungeons & Dragons. They’d been dating for more than a year, but it was over as soon as he heard Whitney sing. Jeff Hayes had fallen in love.
    Or so it seemed.
    Lena pushed the Save button, and played the message back.
    He was getting to her, definitely getting to her. Lena walked through every room in the house. Her bedroom was as she’d left it, bed unmade, T-shirt thrown across the pillow. In the bathroom a wet towel was slung over the towel bar, a dripping washrag wadded over the soap dish in the tub, a bottle of shampoo open on the counter. No one had been in Kevin’s old room. A mobile with a stuffed giraffe, a hippo, and a lion hung forlorn and dusty in the corner. The red-and-yellow wallpaper was still bright.
    Lena closed the door and went to the basement.
    Daylight streamed through the small ground-floor window, giving the room a murky illumination. Lena dodged the boxes and Kevin’s old crib, and pulled the cord that hung from the light bulb in the middle of the ceiling.
    Shadows, spiders, dust.
    She sat on the bottom step of the rough wooden staircase. The basement was cool and humid, like a cave with a sour smell. She ought to have gotten rid of it all—the old clothes, the storybooks, the fuzzy brown pony on yellow rollers. She opened the box that was lodged near the bottom stair and found a pair of worn blue Osh-Kosh overalls. She remembered how Kevin had stashed toys down the front of the overalls till he could barely walk. She glanced at the third row of boxes, in particular the second box from the top. Hayes’s stuff. Undisturbed. He’d hardly know what box to look in, if he even remembered that Whitney had those old things.
    Lena stood on her tiptoes and stretched. No sooner did she have hold of the box than it slipped out of her hands and landed hard. She peeled back the cardboard flaps, and a cloud of fine-grained dust made her sneeze.
    From the looks of things, Whitney had upended drawers and dumped them straight in the box. Lena burrowed through old bank statements, a ripped pair of Jockey shorts—size 34—and a copy of The Nightmare Years , by William L. Shirer. There were candle stubs, black and white, a thin dusty book with a black cover titled Miniatore’s Grimoire , and a few wrinkled sheets of parchment.
    And that was all. Except for a small tan spider.
    Lena picked up the copy of Miniatore’s Grimoire . It had an ancient, musty smell, and the cover was warped, as if it had been left in the rain. The words were in Italian, the print tiny and ornate.
    She picked up the Shirer. It felt oddly light and lumpy. She flipped the book open, and smiled thinly.
    Hayes had hollowed it out, cutting the pages away with jagged, laborious trouble, leaving an inch of margin all the way around. Inside was a hardbound notebook. Across the black cover, Book of Shadows had been written in calligraphy with blood red ink.
    Jeffrey Hayes had been lettered on the inside cover. 1971 . Lena did a quick calculation. In 1971,